“When we learn how to be present with feelings, thoughts, mental images and sensations, and are no longer disembodied, we truly break free. And as a result, it is easier to live from and as present moment awareness because we are ready and willing to meet everything we have been trying to avoid.”
We grow up disembodied if our parents don’t teach us how to feel. Our childhood can condition us not to come down into our bodies to feel our feelings, and to rest with them. We don’t always learn that. When we come to spiritual teachings, including nonduality, it’s quite normal for us to continue in that habit. What we really need are the teachings and the methods that correct this disembodiment. Sometimes the teachings don’t work because the teachers themselves, or those that are bringing the method, haven’t themselves broken the habit. I have done plenty of bypassing. If it seems like I’m pointing a finger somewhere, I’m pointi…How to Truly Help Someone to Heal – Jeff Foster
By Jeff Foster
One of the most challenging experiences we could possibly have is when we’re sitting with someone we love - a friend, a partner, mother, father, a loved one - and they’re in pain. You may also be a therapist working with someone who has come to you in a lot of pain. The pain could be physical or emotional. They could experience intense pain in their body or be going through huge changes in their emotions. They might experience grief, anger, sadness, or a sense of loss or confusion. Perhaps they feel as if their life is falling apart, that their heart is broken wide open. Maybe they’ve lost something or someone they thought belonged to them, and they’re in a place of absolute chaos. It can be challenging enough to meet the chaos and discomfort within ourselves, but what about meeting it in a loved one? Often that can leave us feeling so powerless and helpless.
Stop rushing to make them better
When we face a loved one in pain, so quickly, we rush to solve the…
Read more
The Dark Night of the Spiritual Journey
The article consists of extracts from Fiona Roberston’s book ‘The Dark Night of the Soul: A Journey from Absence to Presence’
The spiritual journey is not a matter of transcending or somehow overcoming our humanity, but of maturing into the depths of it, of realising and becoming who we really and uniquely are. There is no end to this unfolding; it does not conclude in some triumphant attainment or achievement, nor does it confer specialness in any shape or form. Such metamorphosis is unconditional; opening to life in the present inevitably entails opening to the unfelt pain of the past. Self-knowledge and even wisdom are forged in the embodying of pain in a way that cannot be taught.
Finding balance and reclaiming our deepest being
Much of modern spirituality has lost its balance. The cult of lightness and so-called positivity is endemic. Those emotions characterised as negative—terror, fury, fear, shame, angst, guilt, outrage, grief, resentment, sadness, horro…
Read more
Nondual Therapy – an Inevitable (R)evolution
By Georgi Y. Johnson
Read more
“As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears.”
- Rumi
Therapy is about healing, which is the compassionate movement needed to return to naturalness and wholeness. Willow is not a mystical person, she’s rational, smart and practical. We’re sitting together at the university campus, discussing the science of pain. We’re reminding ourselves of the often mysterious and unreliable lack of correlation between the sensation of pain and physical disorder. Like all experience, pain is sublimely subjective. One person can have an injury in the knee and experience a life of ease. Another, with an identical injury, can be incapacitated by agony. Willow’s face changes and she seeks direct eye contact over her spectacles. She’s insecure but earnest: “At my father’s funeral, it hurt so much... It was physical pain. Literally, here in the body,” she said, banging her sternum and clawi…What is nondual therapy?
What is nonduality?
‘Nonduality’ means ‘not two’, or ‘one without a second’. Although the word is often associated with the ancient Indian philosophy of Advaita, the understanding of fundamental oneness can be identified in mystical origins throughout all cultures. Nondual understanding denotes the deep knowing and direct insight into an essential awareness or consciousness that underlies and manifests the apparent play of separateness or duality. From the nondual perspective, the divide between individuals, objects, and all phenomena, is nothing but a conceptual construct.
Nonduality reveals our true nature – the expressions of consciousness that everybody shares, including freedom, joy, peace and love. This knowledge, which isn’t intellectual knowledge, found in the insights of various sages through the ages, is the core of Hindu Vedanta, nearly all schools of Buddhism, and Taoism, and mystical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Nonduality does not negate the appearance…
Read more
An existential holding that embraces and releases experience
By Nic Higham
"Beneath the stories about who you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going is a deep receptivity which is both creative and accepting—it is the fundamental nondual source and also the unconditional embrace of your stories. It’s what I call Deep Knowing: an all-encompassing awareness that holds every experience."
Shraddha is a Sanskrit term whose nearest English equivalent is “faith,” although this isn’t a brilliant translation. “Conviction” is another loose translation. Shraddha means “that which is placed in the heart.” When we take an honest look into our hearts, we find many unquestioned beliefs we’ve been holding onto for a long time. We can ask: “In what way do my fears and desires divert me from tranquility?” These structural beliefs form an unconscious map of reality which dictates our perception of ourselves and the world. As the Bhagavad Gita says, “A person is what his shraddha is”. Whatever we hold with affection and con…
Read more
Our Deep Sense of Disconnection Triggers Our Endless Seeking
To learn to see, to learn to hear, you must do this—go into the wilderness alone. —Don José
Fundamentally, at the heart of our suffering is our sense of separateness from life, which means that we experience life through the eyes of duality. I am separate from you. You and I live in a time-and-space-based world of countless people and objects. We might end up wondering about true connection or how to put an end to our separateness.
Our sense of separation fuels our society’s every pursuit: material, psychological, professional, social, and spiritual. Innocently, we’re looking in the wrong places; assuming love, peace, acceptance—or whatever we’re seeking to be complete—is out there; seeking somewhere, something, or someone else. It’s our disconnection that triggers this outward seeking. This agitated deficiency only creates more division and suffering, bearing little fruit.
The origins of separationIn psyc…